Just another day for you and me in paradise

Okay.  Just to clarify, this is not necessarily paradise.  It is hot and sometimes it storms, but paradise it is not.  :)  Life has been busy.  Joseph had Kid's Kollege (I hate it when they purposely misspell words like this).  He learned how to cook, all about animals, how to use tools and about weird science.  He had a lot of fun.  Samuel and I kept busy by unpacking.  We also went to the library a ton last week for their activities.  Target came for story time and gave the kids pencils, stickers, and coloring books.  We went to the Mini Coastal event where the kids learned about beaches, shells and how to cast fishing lines.  They also did crafts.  Joseph reached his 15 hours of reading for the summer reading program and he got a medal.  Samuel still needs 5 hours, so I need to get busy helping him reach that.  On Thursday, we went and did a tie-dye creepy crawly craft with markers at the library.  The boys had fun with that.  On Saturday I started dividing the Legos.  We have a lot and the boys tend to fight over them, so I have been splitting them up as evenly as possible. 

I also started going through my memory boxes to purge my plethora of stuff.  I am trying to get it to one bin, but it is taking a lot of work.  I need to start scanning pictures.  Speaking of pictures, our external hard drive with all of our pictures and videos crashed.  It is at a data retrieval company right now.  It makes me sad to think that I didn't get around to printing all of the pictures or even most of the pictures.  I am grateful I made picture books for the boys at Christmas.   Hopefully we will recover some, if not all, of our pictures and videos. 

Life is good.  We miss Pennsylvania and the East Coast, but maybe it will be in our futures one day.  Till then, we will beat the heat at home in the AC and when it gets cooler, we will start working on the yard again. 

Lizards, and Geckos, and Toads...oh my

The boys love trying to catch all of the above.  We usually let them keep them overnight and then they have to release them.  We did have 2 toads, 1 green anole, and 1 gecko in 1 tank for a few weeks.  We bought lots of crickets to supplement their diet.  We then let them all go.  The boys are hankering to have pet any of the above now.  We cleared out a rotten log pile in our back yard and the boys caught 3 geckos and 1 toad.  There were also grub worms (nasty looking creatures) and lots of giant cockroaches in the pile.  We saw 1 salamander, but it was too quick for us.  Yesterday I was clearing out boxes in front of our garage and there was a salamander.  Joseph managed to catch it.  Today the boys were playing outside and they saw a baby toad.  Samuel caught it.  Now the boys really want to keep them.  I told them we would have to see.  We do have 2 terrariums, but I don't know if I want them to have more pets.  We already have 2 guppies that won't die.  Joseph's 1st grade teacher gave them to him.  Anyways.  I guess as long as they don't sneak them into the house and put them in a dollhouse which then gets knocked over by grandma as she cleans thus causing about 30 toads and frogs to escape into the house, then we are okay.